Waren Spector talks about his time in the house of the mouse

Warren Spector reflects on his time at Disney to GamesIndustry International and talks about Junction Point, Oswald, and what’s next for him now that he’s no longer in the Mickey Mouse Club.

Well, I’ve learned that I don’t play politics very well, that’s for sure, and I’m not great with bosses, generally. I’ve learned that anyone in the game business who thinks they understand how big, publicly traded companies work because they’ve worked for EA or something have NO CLUE. Disney’s a BIG company, and things change when you have that many divisions and employees. I spent a lot of time saying to myself, ‘There has to be a reason for this… There has to be a reason for this…’ I just didn’t get how a lot of decisions got made – but I think that was my problem, not Disney’s. Overall, the company’s pretty amazing.

The closure of the studio? I don’t know that I learned much from that, to tell the truth. I don’t really understand it, but it is what it is. Junction Point had a good eight year run. We built a great team. We worked on a bunch of cool stuff, even if a lot of it didn’t see the light of day (Sleeping Giants… Ninja Gold… some other stuff I can’t talk about). And we shipped two triple-A titles which, Metacritic notwithstanding, sold better than any games I’ve ever worked on and about which I received more – and more heartfelt – fan mail than I’ve ever received. I’m good with all that.

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